The Joyful Heart Part 8

Few supporters of the general plan, on the other hand, were wholly in favor of all the measures proposed for carrying it out. Some of the most telling criticisms went to show that while poets of undoubted ability ought to be helped, the method of their selection offers a grave difficulty. H. G. Wells, who heartily approved the main idea, brought out the fact that it would never do to leave the choice to a jury, as no jury would ever have voted for half of the great poets who have perished miserably. Juries are much too conventionally minded.

For they are public functionaries; or, if not that, at least they feel self-consciously as if they were going to be held publicly responsible, and are apt to bring extremely conventional, and perhaps priggish, standards to bear upon their choice. "They invariably become timid and narrow," wrote Mr. Wells, "and seek refuge in practical, academic, and moral tests that invariably exclude the real men of genius."

Prizes and compet.i.tions were considered equally ill-advised methods of selection. It is significant that these methods are now being rapidly dropped in the fields of sculpture and architecture. For the mere thought of a compet.i.tion is a thing essentially antagonistic to the creative impulse; and talent is likely to acquit itself better than genius in such a struggle. The idea of a poetic compet.i.tion is a relic of a pioneer mode of thought. Mr. Wells concluded that the decision should be made by the individual. But I cannot agree with him that that same individual should be the donor of the fellowship. It seems to me that this would-be savior of our American poetry should select the best judge of poets and poetry that he can discover and be guided by his advice.

On general principles, there are several things that this judge should _not_ be. He should not be a professor of English, because of the professor's usual bias toward the academic. Besides, these fellowships ought not in any way to be a.s.sociated with inst.i.tutions of learning--places which are apt to fetter poets and surround them with an atmosphere hostile to the creative impulse. Neither should this momentous decision be left to editors or publishers, because they are usually suffering from literary indigestion caused by skimming too many ma.n.u.scripts too fast, and because, at any rate, they ordinarily pay little attention to poetry and hold it commercially "in one grand despise." Nor should the normal type of poet be chosen as judge to decide this question. For the poet is apt to have a narrow, one-sided view of the field. He has probably developed his own distinctive style and personality at the expense of artistic catholicity and kindly breadth of critical judgment. The creative and the critical faculties are usually as distinct and as mutually exclusive spheres as that of the impa.s.sioned, partisan lawyer and the cool, impartial judge.

To whom, then, should the decision be left? It should, in my opinion, be left to a real _judge_--to some broad, keen critic of poetry with a clear, unbiased contemporary view of the whole domain of the art. It matters not whether he is professional or amateur, so he is untouched by academicism and has not done so much reading or writing as to impair his mental digestion and his clarity of vision. Care, of course, would have to be used in safeguarding the critic-judge against undue pressure in favor of this candidate or that; and in safeguarding the inc.u.mbent of the fellowship from yet more insidious influences.

For the apparently liberated poet would merely have exchanged prisons if he learned that the founder of the fellowship wished to dictate what sort of poetry he should write.

The idea of poetry fellowships is not as novel as it perhaps may sound. It is no mere empirical theory. Americans ought to be proud to know that, in a modest way, it has recently been tried here, and is proving a success. I am told that already two masters of poetry have been presented to us as free workers in their art by two Boston philanthropists, and have been enabled to accomplish some of their best work through such fellowships as are here advocated. This fact should put cities like New York, Pittsburg, and Chicago on their mettle. For they must realize that Boston, with her quiet, slow-moving, Old-World pace, has not done to poetry a t.i.the of the harm that her more energetic neighbors have, and should therefore not be suffered to bear the entire brunt of the expiation.

Men say that money cannot buy a joyful heart. But next to writing a great poem, I can scarcely imagine a greater happiness than to know that a thousand of my dollars had enabled an imprisoned genius to shake from his shoes the dust of a city office and go for a year to "G.o.d's outdoors," there to free his system of some of the beauty that had chokingly acc.u.mulated there until it had grown an almost intolerable pain. What joy to know that my fellowship had given men the modern New World "Hyperion," or "Prelude," or "Ring and the Book"!

And even if that whole year resulted in nothing more than a "Skylark,"

or a "Rabbi Ben Ezra," or a "Crossing the Bar"--could one possibly consider such a result in the same thought-wave with dollars and cents?

But this thousand dollars might do something even better than help produce counterparts of famous poems created in other times and lands.

It might actually secure the inestimable boon of a year's leisure, a procession of peaceful vistas, and a br.i.m.m.i.n.g cup for one of that "new brood" of "poets to come" which Walt Whitman so confidently counted upon to 'justify him and answer what he was for.' This handful of gold might make it possible for one of these new poets to come into his own, and ours, at once, and in his own person accomplish that fusion, so devoutly to be wished, of those diverse factors of the greatest poetry which have existed among us thus far only in awful isolation--the possession of this one and that of our chief singers.

How fervently we poetry-lovers wish that one of the captains of industry would feel impelled to put his hand into his pocket--if only into his watch-pocket--or adorn his last testament with a modest codicil! It would be such poetic justice if one of those who have prospered through the very speeding-up process which has so seriously crippled our poetry, should devote to its service a small t.i.the of what he has won from poetry's loss--and thus hasten our renaissance of singers, and bring a new dawn, 'brighter than before known,' out of the dusk of the poets.

IX

THE JOYOUS MISSION OF MECHANICAL MUSIC

I wonder if any other invention has ever, in such a brief time, made so many joyful hearts as the invention of mechanical music. It has brought light, peace, gladness, and the gift of self-expression to every third or fourth flat, villa, and lonely farmhouse in the land.

Its voice has literally gone out through all the earth, and with a swiftness more like that of light than of sound.

Only yesterday we were marveling at the discovery of the larger magazine audience. Until then we had never dreamed of addressing millions of fellow creatures at one time, as the popular magazine now does. Imagine the astonished delight of Plato or Cervantes, Poe or d.i.c.kens, if they had been given in one week an audience equivalent in number to five thousand readers a year for ten centuries! d.i.c.kens would have called it, I think, "immortality-while-you-wait." Yet this sort of immortality was recently placed at the immediate disposal of the ordinary writer.

The miracle was unique in history. But it did not long remain so. Not content with raining this wonder upon us, history at once poured down a greater. One morning we awoke to find a new and still vaster medium of expression, a medium whose globe-girdling voice was to that of the five-million reader magazine as the roar of Niagara to the roar of a Philadelphia trolley-car. To-day, from wherever civilized man has obtained even a temporary foothold, there arise without ceasing the accents of mechanical music, which talk persuasively to all in a language so universal that even the beasts understand it and c.o.c.k applauding ears at the sound of the master voice. So that, while the magazine writers now address the million, the composers and singers and players make their bows to the billion.

Their omnipresence is astonishing. They are the last to bid you farewell when you leave civilization. They are the first to greet you on your return. When I canoed across the wild Allagash country, I was sped from Moosehead Lake by Caruso, received with open arms at the halfway house by the great-hearted Plancon, and welcomed to Fort Kent by Sousa and his merry men. With Schumann-Heinck, Melba, and Tetrazzini I once camped in the heart of the Sierras. When I persisted to the uttermost secret corner of the Dolomites, I found myself antic.i.p.ated by Kreisler and his fiddle. They tell me that the portly Victor Herbert has even penetrated with his daring orchestra through darkest Africa and gone on to arrange a special benefit, in his home town, for the dalai-lama of Tibet.

One of the most promising things about mechanical music is this: No matter what kind of music or quality of performance it offers you, you presently long for something a little better--unless your development has been arrested. It makes small difference in this respect which one of the three main varieties of instrument you happen to own. It may be the phonograph. It may be the kind of automatic piano which accurately reproduces the performances of the master pianists. It may be the piano-player which indulgently supplies you with technic ready-made, and allows you to throw your own soul into the music, whether you have ever taken lessons or not. Or it may be a combination of the last two. The influence of these machines is progressive. It stands for evolution rather than for devolution or revolution.

Often, however, the evolution seems to progress by sheer accident.

This is the way the accident is likely to happen. Jones is buying records for the family phonograph. One may judge of his particular stage of musical evolution by his purchases, which are: "Meet me in St. Louis, Louis," "Dance of the Honey Bells," "h.e.l.lo Central, Give me Heaven," "Fashion Plate March," and "I Know that I'll be Happy when I Die." He also notices in the catalogue a piece called "Tannhauser March," and, after some hesitation, buys this as well, because the name sounds so much like his favorite brand of beer that he suspects it to be music of a convivial nature--a medley of drinking-songs, perhaps.

But that evening in the parlor it does not seem much like beer. When the Mephisto Military Band strikes it up--far from seeming in the least alcoholic, it exhilarates n.o.body. So Jones inters it in the darkest corner of the music-cabinet. And the family devote themselves to the cake-walks and comic medleys, the fandangoes and tangos, the xylophone solos, the shakedowns and break-downs and the rags and tatters of their collection until they have thoroughly exhausted the delights thereof. Then, having had time to forget somewhat the flatness of "Tannhauser," and for want of anything better to do, they take out the despised record, dust it, and insert it into the machine.

But this time, curiously enough, the thing does not sound quite so flat. After repeated playings, it even begins to rival the "Fashion Plate March" in its appeal. And it keeps on growing in grace until within a year the "Fashion Plate March" is as obsolete as fashion plates have a habit of growing within a year, while "Tannhauser" has won the distinction of being the best-wearing record in the cabinet.

Then it begins to occur to the Jones family that there must be two kinds of musical food: candy and staples. Candy, like the "Fashion Plate March," tastes wonderfully sweet to the unsophisticated palate as it goes down; but it is easy to take too much. And the cheaper the candy, the swifter the consequent revulsion of feeling. As for the staples, there is nothing very piquant about their flavor; but if they are of first quality, and if one keeps his appet.i.te healthy, one seems to enjoy them more and more and to thrive on them three times a day.

Accordingly, Jones is commissioned, when next he visits the music-store, to get a few more records like "Tannhauser." On this occasion, he may even be rash enough to experiment with a Schubert march, or a Weber overture, or one of the more popular movements of a Beethoven sonata. And so the train of evolution will rush onward, bearing the Joneses with it until fashion-plate marches are things of the misty, backward horizon, and the family has, by little and little, come to know and love the whole blessed field of cla.s.sical music. And they have found that the word "cla.s.sical" is not a synonym for dry-rot, but that it simply means the music that wears best.

However the glorious mistake may occur, it is being made by someone every hour. By such hooks and crooks as these, good music is finding its way into more and more homes. Although its true "cla.s.sical"

nature is detected at the first trial, it is not thrown away, because it cost good money. It is put away and bides its time; and some day the surprising fact that it has wearing qualities is bound to be discovered. To those who believe in the law of musical evolution, and who realize that mechanical music has reached the wide world, and is even beginning to penetrate into the public library, the possibility of these happy accidents means a sure and swift general development in the appreciation of the best music.

Those who know that man's musical taste tends to grow better and not worse, know also that _any_ music is better than no music. A mechanical instrument which goes is better than a new concert grand piano that remains shut.

"Canned music may not be the highest form of art," the enthusiast will say with a needless air of half apology, half defiance, "but I enjoy it no end." And then he will go on to tell how the parlor melodeon had gathered dust for years until it was given in part exchange for a piano-player. And now the thing is the joy of the family, and the home is filled with color and effervescence, and every one's head is filled with at least a rudiment of living, growing musical culture.

The fact is, the piano-player is turning thousands of supposedly humdrum, prosaic people into musical enthusiasts, to their own immense surprise. Many of these people are actually taking lessons in the subtle art of manipulating the machine. They are spending more money than they can afford on vast collections of rolls. They are going more and more to every important concert for hints on interpretation.

Better still, the most musical among them are being piqued, by the combined merits and defects of the machine, into learning to play an _un_mechanical instrument for the joy of feeling less mechanism interposed between themselves and "the real thing."

Machinery has already done as much for the true spirit of music as the "safe and sane" movement has done for the true spirit of the Fourth of July. Both have shifted the emphasis from brute noise and fireworks to more spiritual considerations. The piano-player has done a great deal to cheapen the glamour of mere technical display on the part of the virtuosi and to redeem us from the thralldom of the school of Liszt.

Our admiration for musical gymnastics and tight-rope balancing is now leaking away so fast through the perforations of the paper rolls that the kind of display-piece known as the concerto is going out of fashion. The only sort of concerto destined to keep our favor is, I imagine, that of the Schumann or Brahms type, which depends for its effect not at all on display, but on sound musicianship alone. The virtuoso is destined soon to leave the circus business and bid a long farewell to his late colleagues, the sword-swallower, the trapeze artist, the strong man, the fat lady, the contortionist, and the gentleman who conducts the sh.e.l.l-and-pea game. For presently the only thing that will be able to entice people to concerts will be the soul of music. Its body will be a perfectly commonplace affair.

Many a good musician fears, I know, that machine-made music will not stop with annihilating vulgar display, but will do to death all professional music as well. This fear is groundless. Mechanical instruments will no more drive the good pianist or violinist or 'cellist out of his profession than the public library, as many once feared, will drive the bookseller out of business. For the library, after persuading people to read, has taught them how much pleasure may be had from owning a book, with the privilege of marking it and scribbling one's own ideas on the margins, and not having to rush it back to headquarters at inopportune moments and pay to a stern young woman a fine of eight cents. Likewise people are eventually led to realize that the joy of pa.s.sively absorbing the product of phonograph or electric piano contrasts with the higher joy of listening creatively to music which the hearer helps to make, in the same way that borrowing a book of Browning contrasts with owning a book of Browning. I believe that, just as the libraries are yearly educating hosts of book-buyers, so mechanical music is cooperating with evolution to swell the n.o.ble army of those who support concerts and give private musicales.

Of course there is no denying that the existence of music-making machinery has a certain relaxing effect on some of the less talented followers of the muse of strumming, sc.r.a.ping, screeching, and blatting. This is because the soul of music is not in them. And in striving to reproduce its body, they perceive how hopeless it is to compete with the physical perfection of the manufactured product. In like manner, the invention of canned meats doubtless discouraged many minor cooks from further struggles with their craft. But these losses, I, for one, cannot bring myself to mourn.

What seems a sounder complaint is that the phonograph, because it reproduces with equal readiness music and the spoken word, may become an effective instrument of satire in the hands of the clever philistine. Let me ill.u.s.trate. To the Jones collection of records, shortly after "Tannhauser" began to win its way, there was added a reactionary "comic" record ent.i.tled "Maggie Clancy's New Piano." In the record Maggie begins playing "Tannhauser" very creditably on her new instrument. Presently the voice of old Clancy is heard from another room calling, "Maggie!" The music goes on. There is a _crescendo_ series of calls. The piano stops.

"Yes, Father?"

"Maggie, is the new pianny broke?"

"No, Father; I was merely playing Wagner."

Old Clancy meditates a moment; then, with a gentleness of touch that might turn a New York music critic green with envy, he replies: "Oh, I thought ye wuz shovelin' coal in the parlor stove."

Records like these have power to r.e.t.a.r.d and roughen the otherwise smooth course of a family's musical evolution; but they are usually unable to arrest it. In general I think that such satires may fortify the elder generation in its conservative mistrust of cla.s.sical music.

But if they are only heard often enough by the young, I believe that the sympathies of the latter will end in chiming with the taste of the enlightened Maggie rather than with that of her father.

Until recently a graver charge against the phonograph has been that it was so much better adapted for reproducing song than pure instrumental music that it was tending to identify the art of music in the minds of most men with song alone. This tendency was dangerous. For song is not all of music, nor even its most important part. The voice is naturally more limited in range, technic, and variety of color than many another instrument. And it is artificially handicapped by the rather absurd custom which forces the singer to drag in poetry (much to the latter's disadvantage), and therewith distract his own attention and that of his audience from the music.

The fact remains that one art at a time is none too easy for even the most perfect medium of expression to cope with. To make a somewhat less than perfect instrument like the human voice, cope always with two simultaneously is an indication that the young art of music has not yet emerged from its teens. This is one reason why most song is as yet so intrinsically unmusical. Its reach is, as a rule, forced to exceed its grasp. Also the accident of having a fine voice usually determines a singer's career, though a perfect vocal organ does not necessarily imply a musical nature. The best voices, in fact, often belong, by some contrariety of fate, to the worst musicians. For these and other reasons, there is less of the true spirit of music to be heard from vocal cords than from the cords and reeds and brazen tubes of piano, organ, string quartet, and orchestra. Thus, when the phonograph threatened to identify song with music in general, it threatened to give the art a setback and make the singer the arch-enemy of the wider musical culture. Fortunately the phonograph now gives promise of averting this peril by bringing up its reproduction of absolute music near to its vocal standard.

Another charge against most machine-made music is its unhuman accuracy. The phonograph companies seldom give out a record which is not practically perfect in technic and intonation. As for the mechanical piano, there is no escape from the certainty of just what notes are coming next--that is, if little Johnnie has not been editing the paper record with his father's leather-punch. Therefore one grows after a while to long for a few of those deviations from mathematical precision which imply human frailty and lovableness. One reason why the future is veiled from us is that it is so painful to be certain that one's every prediction is coming true.

A worse trouble with the phonograph is that it seems to leave out of account that essential part of every true musical performance, the creative listener. A great many phonograph records sound as though the recorder had been performing to an audience no more spiritually resonant than the four walls of a factory. I think that the makers of another kind of mechanical instrument must have realized this oversight on the part of the phonograph manufacturer. I mean the sort of electric piano which faithfully reproduces every _nuance_ of the master pianists. Many of the records of this marvelous instrument sound as though the recording-room of the factory had been "papered"

with creative listeners who cooperated mightily with the master on the stage. Would that the phonographers might take the hint!

But no matter how effectively the creative listener originally cooperates with the maker of this kind of record, the electric piano does not appeal as strongly to the creative listener in his home as does the less perfect but more impressionable piano-player, which responds like a cycle to pedal and brake. For the records of the phonograph and of the electric piano, once they are made, are made.

Thereafter they are as insensible to influence as the laws of the Medes and Persians. They do not admit the audience to an active, influential part in the performance. But such a part in the performance is exactly what the true listener demands as his democratic right. And rather than be balked of it, he turns to the less sophisticated mechanism of the piano-player. This, at least, responds to his control.

Undeniably, though, even the warmest enthusiasts for the piano-player come in time to realize that their machine has distinct limitations; that it is better suited to certain pieces than to others. They find that music may be performed on it with the more triumphant success the less human it is and the nearer it comes to the soullessness of an arabesque. The best operator, by pumping or pulling stops or switching levers, cannot entirely succeed in imbuing it with the breath of life.

The disquieting fact remains that the more a certain piece demands to be filled with soul, the thinner and more ghost-like it comes forth.

The less intimately human the music, the more satisfactorily it emerges. For example, the performer is stirred by the "Tannhauser March," as rendered by himself, with its flourish of trumpets and its general hurrah-boys. But he is unmoved by the apostrophe to the "Evening Star" from the same opera. For this, in pa.s.sing through the piano-player, is almost reduced to a frigid astronomical basis. The singer is no longer Scotti or Bispham, but Herschel or Laplace. The operator may pump and switch until he breaks his heart--but if he has any real musical instinct, he will surely grow to feel a sense of lack in this sort of music. So for the present, while confidently awaiting the invention of an improved piano-player, which shall give equally free expression to every mood and tense of the human spirit--the operator learns to avoid the very soulful things as much as is practicable.

At this stage of his development he usually begins to crave that supreme kind of music which demands a perfect balance of the intellectual, the sensuous, and the emotional. So he goes more often to concerts where such music is given. Saturated with it, he returns to his piano-player and plays the concert all over again. And his imagination is now so full of the emotional side of what he has just heard and is re-hearing, that he easily discounts the obvious shortcomings of the mechanical instrument. This is an excellent way of getting the most from music. One should not, as many do, take it from the piano-player before the concert and then go with its somewhat stereotyped accents so fixed in the mind as to obscure the heart of the performance. Rather, in preparation, let the score be silently glanced through. Leave wide the doors of the soul for the precious spiritual part of the music to enter in and take possession. After this happens, use mechanical music to renew your memories of the concert, just as you would use a catalogue ill.u.s.trated with etchings in black and white, to renew your memory of an exhibition of paintings.